Post-Toyota Lean: Eliminating The Mirage of Culture

In my early days as a lean consultant, I could really only talk about what I had learned about Toyota and what I had experienced myself in my work for HP.

When talking about Toyota to a skeptical audience, I would inevitably hear two things: 1) We're not a car company. 2) We're not Japanese.

The first is easy to dispatch: "I don't think that you can become Toyota. I think you can become the Toyota of your industry: deeply respected, even revered for your ability to make products that delight both customers and shareholders."

As far as culture goes, that's always been a smokescreen. Toyota did nothing more or less than deeply understand their systems and seek to optimize them. I agree that their culture probably gave them greater ability to do this than most Western companies would have had, but that doesn't mean that we can't benefit from their knowledge about manufacturing systems or product design.

But they themselves demonstrated that the "Japanese culture issue" was a mirage when they took over the NUMMI plant in Fremont, CA and turned it around in the 1980s - and even more so recently when they allowed ambition to overshadow their commitment to customer value, proving that their culture and history did not grant them immunity from the laws of physics.

Fortunately, we're nearing the 20th anniversary of the release of the book The Machine That Changed the World, and that book did indeed change the world. Today, we find exemplary examples of lean manufacturing, lean office and lean product development on every continent, in such a wide variety of cultures and industries that the criticisms I used to receive are now laughable.

At some point along the way we learned that lean was never about Toyota, and it was never about Japan. It was always about the passion we share for creating customer value, eliminating waste and enriching ourselves in the process, both materially and as people.